This should address a number of issues and requests that have been expressed. One new feature planned for Beta2 is an API to render a template against data, straight to an HTML string, without any dependency on an HTML DOM. This can then be used for direct insertion as innerHTML, and will also enable easy use of jQuery Templates for rendering on the server, as well as improved performance of jQuery Templates when used in the browser for read-only scenarios.

At the same time all the power of jQuery Templates will still be there, for those that choose to render templates with the full DOM activation phase included, as at present.

In the case of server rendering, the idea is that the DOM activation can still happen in the browser, against server-rendered HTML. So progressive enhancement scenarios should be relatively easy to achieve...

This involves significant changes to the current Data Link implementation, with much broader scenario coverage than at present. I hope to push my present code for this new version to a Beta2 branch of jQuery Data Link soon, for those who are curious about the ongoing design.

It comes in two versions - a jQuery plugin, and another version that does not require jQuery to be loaded in the page.

As well as providing some of the features we had in our Microsoft AJAX script loader, JsDefer also takes advantage of the concept of a "Deferred" object, to facilitate working with asynchronous processes (in particular, of course, the process of dynamically fetching a script and loading it into the page). The recent jQuery 1.5 release uses Deferred objects in the context of AJAX requests, so JsDefer is designed to work 'hand in glove' with jQuery 1.5 AJAX requests, among other scenarios.

I plan to publish a blog post on JsDefer very soon, with an initial dive into how it works and the scenarios it addresses.